Integrity

I won’t make myself clear enough to them, and that’s why they say their dripping and thipping won’t stop. They’ll never be satisfied as long as they harbor passive disgust for their own creative sterility, flaccidity.

They keep it so cruelly hot in here, in this effective oven, that they won’t come in, the sanctimonious pussies, the aimless who sling shit from afar and, in their hearts of hearts, on petty, irrelevant grounds.

I won’t say what they want me to say in the way they want me to say it, I won’t say what I want to say in the way they want me to say it, and I won’t say what they think I should want to say in the way they want me to say it—in the way they’re conditioned to hear it.

They’ve given me plenty of chances, goaded me relentlessly to abandon integrity, and I won’t; I’ve had plenty of chances to give up what makes me a man, what makes my aesthetic mine, and I will not.

The compassionate writer knows when to say “with all due respect, I don’t respect your opinion, and I suggest you fuck off before you begin to consciously see yourself as an addled fool.”